In Germany Today, It's 'Zionism Above Everything'
Germany's absurd crackdown on anti-Zionist Jews and other pro-Palestinian voices makes you wonder: has the country not learned anything from its horrific past?
Imagine that your family had been victims of one of the worst crimes in human history, and you were criminalized for sharing your personal interpretation of it by the successors of the people who did it.
For Thomas, a Jew from Berlin who didn’t want his surname mentioned to keep his family safe, this isn’t just a grotesque thought experiment; it’s part of the increasingly surreal political life in modern Germany that appears to have weaponized political gaslighting about antisemitism.
Thomas’ father survived the Holocaust by being bought free from a concentration camp by a Jewish American aid organization. The rest of his family didn’t and were transported straight to Auschwitz, where they were gassed. Thomas, a member of Jüdische Stimme, the German partner of Jewish Voice for Peace, says this experience inspired him to defend the equal value of human life.
But last week, Thomas was accused by a German police officer of glorifying the Holocaust, during which his own family was killed, and charged with incitement to racial hatred. “It’s unbelievable,” Thomas told me.
His crime? He drew parallels between the way that Jews like his family members were taken to the gas chambers and how Palestinians are being forced to fenced-in “aid sites,” only to be targeted by Israeli forces. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed at or near these so-called aid sites.
It’s worth mentioning that the German police were deeply involved in the Holocaust, especially the so-called “Holocaust by bullets,” when 2 million Jews and others were executed one by one, shot by servants of the German state in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe.
In November 2024, Berlin’s police president declared that antisemitic violence had risen to the point that parts of the city were no longer safe for Jews, a message that understandably made headlines worldwide. That, of course, sounds shocking, but it was a piece of gaslighting so absurd, you may want to sit down before you read the next paragraph.